There was something strange lurking in the basement of Sam Miller’s childhood home in the 1990s. It wasn’t exactly a monster, but a weird mechanical contraption. As a visiting scientist at MIT, Sam’s father, Larry, had been trying to understand and replicate human movement. The apparatus was the fruit of that unfulfilled quest.
“He had this idea while he was at MIT, and then he went off on his own and tried to develop it,” Miller, 32, said, “and was doing it in the basement of my house growing up. Me and everyone that I knew—family, friends—always knew about what we called ‘The Machine.’”
“And it effectively did nothing.”